A Wenner-Gren workshop: Real Economy: Ethnographic Inquiries into the Reality and the Realization of Economic Life. Rio de Janeiro June 16-18

The workshop will focus on discussing the history and current construction of the ‘real economy,’ a key category in contemporary economic thinking and practices, both in the world of experts and in ordinary life. The real economy and its opposites (the virtual or fictitious economy) have become increasingly central to interpretations of the experiences of globalization, economic crises and financial fluxes, to measurements of poverty and consumption, as well as to analyses of the nature of money or the conceptualization and implementation of monetary policies. The papers to be presented at the workshop (highly diversified in terms of ethnographic settings and institutional affiliations of their authors) will allow for a profound and innovative ethnographic and comparative comprehension of the entanglements and assemblages between native modes of conceptualizing and referring to the ‘reality’ of economy life and modes of turning diverse aspects of ‘the economy’ into an observable, quantifiable and objectified reality. Continue reading →

This panel brings together work analyzing money as an object of the social sciences. It proposes, in that sense, an interdisciplinary dialogue among sociological, ethnographic, and historical approaches. Far from the image of money as a colorless phenomenon, devoid of social meaning and moral valuation, money appears here marked and qualified by its diverse uses: as suspicious money, dirty money, easy money, volatile money. The multiple lives of money in Latin America presented here traverse diverse countries (Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, etc.) and, at the same time, account for its complex transnational dynamics.Continue reading →